"I'll be working from home today..."

Picture: Microsoft

There was a time when “I’m working from home” was a euphemism for “It’s Friday, it’s a lovely day, and I’m off to the park”. Not me, though, quite obviously. But then we went through a phase of “flexible working”, where technology, corporate economics, a pinch of concern for the environment, and an enlightened approach to work/life balance made the option of working from home a desirable company policy. Companies needing to downsize their palatial corporate offices in pricey parts of capital cities found that by encouraging, enabling or merely tolerating people to make use of their own home broadband connections, if you threw in a laptop and a mobile phone, employees could be engaged, connected and productive, while happy that they’d won back an extra hour or two’s work that they would have otherwise spent on the commute.

It should, however, be noted that this apparent utopia is not for everyone. For a start, you can never work from home if that home is cluttered and full of other people. Including pets. Especially cute ones, like cats, which hog your attention without reciprocating the love. Secondly, hogging a table at Caffè Nero while occasionally ordering a basic Americano and topping up the free tap water is both cheapskate and equally not conducive to productivity, because you'll be staring out the window or at other customers, especially those annoying you with a FaceTime conversation sans headphones. The advice, then, is that you should only work from home if you have a quiet, dedicated space in which to work, as if you were in the office. This point assumes two things: one, that you are suitably well off to own a house with a spare room for such an environment, and two, your job allows for it.

Picture: Slack

Now the Covid-19 coronavirus is taking a hold, more and more companies - especially in the US and particularly in California's Silicon Valley - are telling their employees to work from home in a bid to prevent the contagion from wreaking havoc on corporate campuses. These companies and, indeed, employees, are then the lucky ones. Collaboration technologies like video conferencing and workplace social media apps will enable them to function almost like normal. I speak, here, from personal experience of companies where ‘virtual’ working means that only rarely do you sit in the same space as your teammates. In Silicon Valley, for example, where insane property prices spread workers far and wide into the region's ever-expanding hinterland, avoiding the clogged freeways by not having to commute every day is enormously popular. At my last company, when visiting the HQ in San Jose, there was very little pattern to who would be occupying a desk from one day to the next, such was the spread of people throughout the region, from family members living in rural areas south of the city, to younger colleagues living in San Francisco, more than 50 miles to the north.

Closing down such campuses, then, in the face of Covid-19, might well be beneficial in limiting the spread of the virus, while at the same time enabling the giants of technology to continue functioning. That is, of course, unless functions like R&D and engineering are reliant on workspaces, labs and face-to-face collaboration. Here in the UK, we’ve not yet reached the stage of companies telling their employees to work from home, but it will surely come. Clearly, digital technologies have evolved to the extent that productivity and collaboration is almost like the real thing. And companies cutting down on the insane waste of unnecessary business travel is surely sensible, for the environment, for costs and the individual wellbeing of the employees concerned. However - medical advice encouraging homeworking is all well and good if employees can ‘telework’, to use an arcane expression, but plenty will not.

Bus drivers, supermarket workers, warehouse employees, delivery drivers - the list is endless - don't have the luxury of firing up a laptop while still in their pyjamas. Other companies, who don't yet have widespread teleworking practices, won't suddenly be able to dish out laptops or tablets just like that, especially if it requires a fundamental rethink of IT strategy (including concerns about cybersecurity). Which begs the question (and I’m no medical expert), if some employers adopt homeworking while others can't, will that mean Covid-19 still spreads amongst those who can't stay at home and continue working? And are we condemning those who will still have to take trains and buses to their places of work, or who work in jobs where interaction with the public is unavoidable to exposure to the virus and all its potential consequences? I don't want to be flippant here, and suggest that we're heading for some zombie nightmare, with the streets filled with the sick and Ocado drivers wearing full hazmat suits, but I am struggling to get my head around what the increasingly dystopian world is looking like with this virus. It's bad enough that people have been panic buying toilet paper for a condition not known to have any unpleasant symptoms in the lower reaches of the alimentary canal.

What we do know, it would seem, is that it will get worse. The British government's deputy Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Jenny Harries, told Sky News this morning that the UK should be bracing for a major increase in Covid-19 infections over the next couple of weeks. "We will see many thousands of people infected by coronavirus," she told Kay Burley. "That’s what we’re seeing in other countries and the important thing for us is to make sure that we manage those infections." That will probably involve people staying at home for seven days, even with relatively minor symptoms like a runny nose, all with the intention of minimising the epidemic's expected peak (if Italy is anything to go by), and drive the coronavirus into the summer when it could ease up in milder weather.

A shift - even if temporary and only partial in terms of the national workforce - to greater homeworking might well have some impact on the spread of the virus, especially it eases the horror of overcrowded trains and buses at peak hours. "Everyone who can work from home should work from home," William Hanage of the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health in Bosto told The Guardian yesterday. "The most important thing is that even if it won’t protect you entirely, it will delay you getting infected. And if we can 'flatten the curve' we will avoid the worst consequences for healthcare services." That won't come as much comfort for those who still have to get out there. In that respect, it's not unreasonable to conclude that we'll be creating two classes of people - those who can work from home and those who can't. And godspeed to those in that second camp.